Most modern medium to large enterprises have evolved their IT infrastructure to extend the reach of their once centralized “glass house” data center throughout, and in fact beyond the bounds of their organization. The impetus for such evolution is rooted, in part, in the desire to interconnect heretofore disparate departmental operations, to communicate with suppliers and customers on a real-time basis, and is fueled by the burgeoning growth of the Internet as a medium for electronic commerce and the concomitant access to interconnection and business-to-business solutions that are increasingly being made available to provide such connectivity.
Attendant to this recent evolution is the need for modern enterprises to dynamically link many different operating platforms to create a seamless interconnected system. Enterprises are often characterized by a heterogeneous information systems infrastructure owing to such factors as non-centralized purchasing operations, application-based requirements and the creation of disparate technology platforms arising from merger related activities. Moreover, the desire to facilitate real-time extra-enterprise connectivity between suppliers, partners and customers presents a further compelling incentive for providing connectivity in a heterogeneous environment.
In response to a rapidly growing set of customer requirements, information technology providers have begun to devise data processing solutions that address these needs for extended connectivity for the enterprise data center.
Background information related to subject matter in this specification includes: U.S. patent Ser. No. 09/183,961 “COMPUTATIONAL WORKLOAD-BASED HARDWARE SIZER METHOD, SYSTEM AND PROGRAM PRODUCT” Ruffin et al. which describes analyzing the activity of a computer system; U.S. patent Ser. No. 09/584,276 “INTER-PARTITION SHARED MEMORY METHOD, SYSTEM AND PROGRAM PRODUCT FOR A PARTITIONED PROCESSING ENVIRONMENT” Temple et al. which describes shared memory between logical partitions; U.S. patent Ser. No. 09/253,246 “A METHOD OF PROVIDING DIRECT DATA PROCESSING ACCESS USING QUEUED DIRECT INPUT-OUTPUT DEVICE” Baskey et al which describes high bandwidth integrated adapters; U.S. patent Ser. No. 09/583,501 “Heterogeneous Client Server Method, System and Program Product For A Partitioned Processing Environment” Temple et al. which describes partitioning two different client servers in a system; IBM document SG24-5326-00 “OS/390 Workload Manager Implementation and Exploitation” ISBN: 0738413070 which describes managing workload of multiple partitions; and IBM document SA22-7201-06 ESA/390 Principles of Operation which describes the ESA/390 Instruction set architecture. These documents are incorporated herein by reference.
Initially, the need to supply an integrated system which simultaneously provides processing support for various applications which may have operational interdependencies, has led to an expansion in the market for partitioned multiprocessing systems. Once the sole province of the mainframe computer (such as the IBM S/390 system), these partitioned systems, which provide the capability to support multiple operating system images within a single physical computing system, have become available from a broadening spectrum of suppliers. For example, Sun Microsystems, Inc. has recently begun offering a form of system partitioning in the Ultra Enterprise 10000 high-end server which is described in detail in U.S. Pat. No. 5,931,938 to Drogichen et al. for “Multiprocessor Computer Having Configurable Hardware System Domains” filed Dec. 12, 1996 issued Aug. 3, 1999 and assigned to Sun Microsystems, Inc. Other companies have issued statements of direction indicating their interest in this type of system as well.
This industry adoption underscores the “systems within a system” benefits of system partitioning in consolidating various computational workloads within an enterprise onto one (or a few) physical server computers, and for simultaneously implementing test and production level codes in a dynamically reconfigurable hardware environment. Moreover, in certain partitioned multiprocessing systems such as the IBM S/390 computer system as described in the aforementioned cross-referenced patent applications, resources (including processors, memory and I/O) may be dynamically allocated within and between logical partitions depending upon the priorities assigned to the workload(s) being performed therein (IBM and S/390 are registered trademarks of International Business Machines Corporation). This ability to enable dynamic resource allocation based on workload priorities addresses long-standing capacity planning problems which have historically led data center managers to intentionally designate an excessive amount resources to their anticipated computational workloads to manage transient workload spikes.
While these partitioned systems facilitate the extension of the data center to include disparate systems throughout the enterprise, currently these solutions do not offer a straightforward mechanism for functionally integrating heterogeneous or homogeneous partitioned platforms into a single inter operating partitioned system. In fact, while these new servers enable consolidation of operating system images within a single physical hardware platform, they have not adequately addressed the need for inter-operability among the operating systems residing within the partitions of the server. This inter-operability concern is further exacerbated in heterogeneous systems having disparate operating systems in their various partitions. Additionally, these systems typically have not addressed the type of inter-partition resource sharing between such heterogeneous platforms which would enable a high-bandwidth, low-latency interconnection between the partitions. It is important to address these inter-operability issues since a system incorporating solutions to such issues would enable a more robust facility for communications between processes running in distinct partitions so as to leverage the fact that while such application are running on separate operating system, they are, in fact, local with respect to one another.
In the aforementioned U.S. patent Ser. No. 09/584,276 “INTER-PARTITION SHARED MEMORY METHOD, SYSTEM AND PROGRAM PRODUCT FOR A PARTITIONED PROCESSING ENVIRONMENT” by Temple et al., extensions to the “kernels” of the several operating systems facilitate the use of shared storage to implement cross partition memory sharing. A “kernel” is the core system services code in an operating system. While network message passage protocols can be implemented on the interface thus created, it is often desirable to enable efficient inter process communication without resorting to modification of one or more of the operating systems. It is also often desirable to avoid limiting the isolation of partitions in order to share memory regions as in aforementioned U.S. patent Ser. No. 09/584,276 by Temple et al. or as in the Sun Microsystems Ultra Enterprise 10000 high end server, as described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,931,938. At the same time it is desirable to pass information between partitions at memory speed instead of network speed. Thus a way to move memory between partition memories without sharing addresses is desired.
The IBM S/390 Gbit Ethernet (Asynchronous Coprocessor Data Mover Method and Means, U.S. Pat. No. 5,442,802, issued Aug. 15, 1995 and assigned to IBM) I/O adapter can be used to move data from one partition's kernel memory to another, but the data is moved from the first kernel memory to a queue buffer on the adapter and then transferred to a second queue buffer on the adapter before being transferred to a second kernel memory. This means that there is a total of three data movements in the transfer from memory to memory. In any message passing communications scheme, it is desirable to minimize the number of data movement operations so that the latency of data access approaches that of a single store and fetch to and from a shared storage. A move function has three data move operations for each block of data transferred. A way to remove one or two of these operations is desired.
Similarly, the IBM S/390 Parallel Sysplex Coupling Facility machine can and is used to facilitate inter partition message passing. However, in this case the transfer of data is from a first Kernel Memory to the coupling facility and then from the coupling facility to a second Kernel Memory. This requires two data operations rather than the single movement desired.
In many computer systems it is desirable to validate the identity of a user so that improper use of the data and applications on the machine through unauthorized or unwarranted access is prevented. Various operating and application systems have user authentication and other security services for this purpose. It is desirable to have users entering the partitioned system or indeed any cluster or network of systems to be validated only once on entry or at critical checkpoints such as request for critical resources, or execution of critical system maintenance functions. This desire is known as the “Single Sign on” requirement. Because of this the security servers of the various partitions must interact or be consolidated. Examples of this are the enhancement of the OS/390 SAF (RACF) interface to handle “digital certificates” received from the web, mapping them to the traditional user ID and password validation and entitlement within OS/390, Kerberos security servers, and the emerging LDAP standard for directory services.
Furthermore, because of the competitive nature of e-Commerce the performance of user authentication and entitlement is more important than in traditional systems. While a worker may expect to wait to be authenticated at the start of the day, a customer may simply go elsewhere if authentication takes too long. The use of encryption, because of the public nature of the web, exacerbates this problem. It is also often the case, that a device driver exists in one operating system that has not been written for others. In such cases it is desirable to interface to the device driver in one partition from another partition in an efficient manner. Only network connections are available for this type of operation today.
One of the problems with distributed systems is the management of “white space” or under utilized resources in one system, while other systems are over utilized. There are workload balancers such as IBM's LoadLeveler or Parallel Sysplex features of the OS/390 operating system workload manager which move work between systems or system images. It is possible and desirable in a partitioned computing system to shift resources rather than work between partitions. This is desirable because it avoids the massive context switching and data movement that comes with function shifting.
The “Sysplex Sockets” for IBM S/390 which uses the external clustering connections of the Sysplex to implement a UNIX operating system socket-to-socket connection is an example of some of the prior art. There, a service indicates the level of security available and sets up the connection based on the application's indication of security level required. However, in that case, encryption is provided for higher levels of security, and the Sysplex connection itself has a physical transport layer which was much deeper than the memory connections implemented by the present invention.
Similarly, a web server providing SSL authentication and providing certificate information (as a proxy) to a web application server can be seen as another example where sharing memory or direct memory to memory messages of the present invention are used to advantage. Here the proxy does not have to re-encrypt the data to be passed to the security server, and furthermore does not have a deep connection interface to manage. In fact it will be seen by those skilled in the art that in this embodiment of our invention the proxy server essentially communicates with the security server through a process which is essentially the same as a proxy server running under the same operating system as the security server. U.S. patent Ser. No. 09/411,417 “Methods, Systems and Computer Program Products for Enhanced Security Identity Utilizing an SSL Proxy” Baskey et al. discusses the use of proxy server to perform the secure sockets layer (SSL) in the secure HTTP protocol.